Page 17 - Puhipi

The Maori Wars

“We are now one people” said Captain Hobson at Waitangi. There is no possible doubt

that he meant what he said, nor any doubt that he believed that the treatys
comparatively simple words meant exactly what they appear to mean. Nevertheless it
was soon to be shown that the whiteman and at least a section of brown were not one
people and that in high places others would soon read into the treatys meanings that
were not on the surface.

Hobson made Auckland the capital of the country and the importance of Kororareka
began to decline. The Governors early death was a blow to the infant colony and it was

soon plain that Hobsons successor, well meaning and high principled Robert Fitzroy
did not have the confidence of the majority of the settlers.

New arrivals were beginning to stream into the country, many under immigration
schemes whose ancestry could be traced to the widely accepted theories of Edward

Gibbon Wakefield.

Native brown was meeting immigrant white and the results were not always happy.

The first explosion came at Wairau in the South Island where Te Rauparaha and a
survey party clashed and where 22 Europeans were killed. But it was in the north that
real trouble developed. It started when the influence and income of the chiefs of the
Bay of Islands began to wane with the movements of trade and the imposition of
customs duties. Their reaction was that the old regime was better than the new

particularly as they were still eager to sell land, buyers were offering, but under the
treaty the chiefs could only sell to the Crown and the Crowns representatives had very
little money for anything.

Fitzroy then permitted direct deals with the Maori under which buyers often sold to
the Crown at a higher price, a proceeding which understandably annoyed the Maori
vendor who held that under the treaty they were entitled to what ever the Crown had
to offer. Then when the land commission eventually got to work investigating claims

(and its apparent tardiness was a matter of complaint) deals which exceeded 2560 acres
were not allowed, the surplus going to the Government. The Maori claimed it should
have been returned to them.

But perhaps the most sinister move was the agitation in England to have the treaty
disregarded, or at least to obtain a ruling that land not actually used by Maori was not
theirs at all but was automatically the Crowns. A combination of these factors exercised
the mind of the fiery Ngapuhi chief Hone Heke. A contributory cause to his

dissatisfaction seems to have been the influence of certain American citizens at
Kororareka, in particular the acting consul Captain William Mayhew and his successor
Henry Green Smith. An interesting sidelight is that Heke flew a U.S. ensign given to